Moscow Conference

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Soviets Laugh at U.S. Military

"The worst crime is not to tell the truth to the public." Winston Churchill — prior to World War II, as he tried to warn England and to break government and news media silence about the massive Nazi military buildup.

"We are not just a little bit behind the Russians, we are devastatingly behind them … I think the time has come when we have to quit fooling around and trying to lie to the American people." Senator Barry Goldwater — March 5, 1982, in a letter to President Reagan.

"On April 2, 1984, the Soviet Union initiated, without warning, a total world-wide deployment of its entire Navy. Ballistic missile submarines, aircraft carriers, naval aircraft, surface combatants of every type were all put to sea and in the air under conditions simulating preparation for a general nuclear war. The rare public accounts of this occurrence (buried generally in the overall deafening silence of the American news media) indicated that U.S. intelligence was caught completely by surprise, not only by lack of any forewarning of the exercise, but also by its enormous scale. In the words of one U.S. official, "if it floated, it went to sea, and we were caught with no warning … the whole thing was not just impressive, it was intimidating."

But there was more to come. Immediately after demonstrating the ability to put the largest Navy in the world entirely at sea in a matter of hours with no warning, the Soviets calmly launched from an operational (not test) Strategic Missile Regiment a salvo of six SS-20 ballistic missiles on a trajectory aimed at the United States. In mid-flight, the Soviet missiles were brought down short, somewhere in the Barents Sea, but the underlying message of the mock nuclear attack could not have been lost on our American leaders.

That message is simple. The Soviet Union is increasingly contemptuous of America and American forces. The Soviet Union is on perpetual war footing and is not afraid to threaten the use of power or to use power to see its will prevail. The Soviet Union expects, and will increasingly demand, changes in American behavior to reflect better the new reality in which the correlation of forces has shifted "once and for all and irrevocably" in favor of Russia.

In addition to the large scale maneuvers already described, other incidents have occurred:

Large numbers of Soviet Army reservists (including those assigned to nuclear and chemical missile units) have been recently called up for active service in Eastern Europe.

Off the United States itself, within minutes of Washington, D.C., on at least five occasions in 1984, they have penetrated the U.S. Air Defense Identification Zone with the nuclear-capable TU-95 Bear strategic bomber/reconnaissance aircraft.

In the Far East, they murdered 61 Americans, including the first member of the U.S. Congress ever known to be assassinated by the Soviets, by shooting down Korean Airlines Flight - 007 with 269 innocent people aboard."*

"Throughout 1984, in joint U.S.-USSR sessions of the Standing Consultative Committee on SALT, they have shown complete contempt for our protests of their arms control violations. With increasing openness and with hardly the pretense of excuse, they continue to violate allexisting arms control treaties. (When they are confronted with a bold faced lie, we can almost hear the tide of bemused and disdainful laughter rolling from Novaya Zemly to the Caucasus. With the power they dispose, they could care less what we think.)

Simultaneously and without a trace of shame, while adding five nuclear warheads to their own arsenal each day (the U.S. is reducing warheads), they have intensified the KGB-linked "nuclear freeze" propaganda campaign aimed at blocking the MX missile, the Trident II missile, or any other program which might begin to rectify the present gross degree of American nuclear inferiority.

In Afghanistan, they have continued carpet and incendiary bombing and the employment of genocidal warfare techniques including the use of chemical agents against entire villages.

In the Middle East, they have stationed combat troops in Syria and in Lebanon and have thus backed and emboldened the Syrian and Iranian sponsored terrorists responsible for three Beirut Embassy attacks and the massacre of 241 U.S. Marines.

In Africa, they have increased Cuban troop strength in Angola to over 40,000 in 15 combat brigades and have provided 1,500 of their own troops to operate heavy weapons while sabotaging negotiations for the independence of Namibia.

They recently deliberately vented outside their own borders nuclear radioactive debris (which reached the U.S.) from an underground nuclear weapons test, an event which is strictly prohibited by the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty.

They have increased the drumbeat of war propaganda within the USSR and have been more successful than ever in misleading their own people into believing that the United States is preparing an anti-Russian war and that we might conceivably attack them at any time.

In further defiance of the United States, the Soviets have also provided Nicaragua with at least 3,500 Cuban troops, over 10,500 Soviet and Warsaw Pact military and security advisors, and a vast quantity of additional war materials needed to support the planned rapid expansion of the Nicaraguan Army and Militia from a present level of about 200,000 (the largest in Central America) to a force of up to one-half million men which will give the Soviets control of an armed force in Central America approaching the size of the entire regular United States Army worldwide."

* Although rarely explained in the Press, this act occurred over international waters on the Sea of Japan.

WHAT IT MEANS

"A book authored in 1982 by the then Chief of the Soviet General Staff, Marshal Ogarkov, entitled Always in Readiness to Defend the Homeland, is also not fiction.

Ogarkov stated: "… The task of achieving continuous preparedness for the immediate mobilization deployment of troops and naval forces, prompt and expeditious shifting of the Armed Forces and the entire national economy from a peacetime to war footing, is assuming particular national importance. The question of prompt expeditious shifting of Armed Forces and the entire national economy to a war footing and their mobilization deployment in a short period of time is much more critical today."

To which the Marshall added a uniquely Soviet view of negotiations with the West:

"We should accompany our [negotiating] steps with maximum military preparedness."

These ominous directives are consistent with the longstanding Soviet belief that military supremacy is indispensable to eventual Communist global dominance. As Soviet Marshal V. D. Sokolovsky stated sixteen years ago in the baseline doctrinal work, Soviet Military Strategy:"

The creation and constant maintenance of quantitative and qualitative superiority over the enemy in the nuclear means of armed conflict… is the most important problem of building modern armed forces."

But today, the problem for America is not just that the Soviets have now achieved their objective of strategic supremacy but that they are evidencing an ever-growing propensity to employ strategic supremacy to assert their will.

All of the foregoing Soviet activities, considered together, are fully consistent with Marshal Ogarkov's call for Soviet national mobilization on a wartime basis. These activities are also ominously consistent with an intention to use new military power for secret political intimidation as well as with the oft-repeated Russian subterfuge, a prime feature of Russian history, in which the olive branch of peace is offered publicly to induce a potential victim population to demand its own disarmament.

The picture is too unmistakable to misperceive. The USSR has done all those things that it needs to do in order to be in a position to mobilize swiftly and with surprise its entire strategic potential for the initiation of war. That central fact alone is far more threatening than any single component part, but of the component parts, the potential for nuclear blackmail is the most immediately dangerous to American national independence.

To understand completely how the Soviets are using their awesome military potential for political intimidation, we must recognize that, unlike American forces, Soviet forces are equipped, trained, deployed, and exercised in such a way that they can be used massively and simultaneously on many fronts and at any force level in first strike attack with very little or no warning. The significance of this new Soviet posture of high readiness for surprise action, the keystone of Soviet military doctrine, is that Americans are already gradually beginning to behave in ways affected by Soviet desires and some degree of Soviet control."